Page 30 of Threat of Danger
“Do you?” Derek shifted his weight onto his good leg as he asked the question he’d been wanting to ask for the past decade. “Do you blame me, Jess?”
Her gaze dropped to examine her boots. Her shoulders were stiff. She held herself in rigid control, as if she would fall to pieces if someone touched her.
“I blame myself,” he confessed.
She still remained silent.
No absolution, then.
He didn’t deserve any, in any case. But knowing that didn’t make the ache in his chest feel any better.
He wanted to talk to her about leaving town, but this wasn’t the time. So, instead, he said, “Can I walk you back to your car?”
She still wouldn’t look at him.
“If I can’t, I’m going to follow you at a distance. I hate the idea of you walking through the woods alone.”
“Being with you didn’t make a difference back then, did it?” Her voice was sharp enough to slice into him and make him bleed. She looked up at last.
“I can never tell you how sorry I am about that.”
Again her gaze slid away from his as she passed by him, her long-legged stride quickly eating up the path. He followed after her.
When they were at her car, he said, “Maybe your mom blames you so that she doesn’t have to blame herself. Maybe she can’t live with the thought that you would have been safe if she had only watched you better.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He limped toward the back of the clearing where his own car waited. Guilt was a living, breathing thing. Guilt could tie you tighter than ropes, and he should know. He had extensive experience with both.
He’d been the captive of a madman, along with Jess, for three days that had felt like an eternity. Then, this past year, he’d been a POW in Afghanistan, the prisoner of insurgents, for six torturous months. Yet it had been the three days with Jess that had broken him in ways the insurgents could never accomplish.
Derek stopped by his pickup. He watched Jess get into her little black rental car and begin pulling out.
She stopped when she reached him and rolled down the Honda’s window. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Good.” Exactly what he’d wanted. Except, now he suddenly hated the idea.
She drove away without making eye contact again. The woods looked darker, suddenly, as if she’d taken the sunshine with her. His lungs worked harder, as if she’d taken the air too. She sure as hell had taken his peace of mind once again.
For several seconds, Derek watched the bend in the dirt road where Jess’s car had disappeared. Then he stepped into the pickup’s cab and pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket.
The bag held three small bones he’d found on the riverbank. They weren’t deer or squirrel. Most of the time now he could tell; he’d studied enough pictures on the Internet. He wasn’t sure about these three. These he would show to the vet, an old friend of his, Jared Sabin.
Derek had already marked the location where he found the bones, and had marked the date too, right on the bag with a permanent marker. Now he opened the glove compartment, retrieved the plastic container he kept in there, and carefully stashed the new little bag with the others. He had about a dozen that needed Jared’s expertise.
What Derek wanted to know was—were any of the bones human?
The possibility had him sitting there, gripping the steering wheel, his mind going back to a little camper deep in the woods that had changed everything both for him and Jess.
Three days of hell. Then, finally, the man had left again. Once again, he promised to be back.
But that time, Derek had escaped his ropes. His wrists were bleeding, skin and flesh hanging. He could see the white glint of bone, but he didn’t care about that or the pain.
“Jess!” He shook her gently. “Wake up, Jess.”
They were in a dilapidated camper. He could see his breath in the air. The propane heater had run out of fuel that morning. Maybe that was why the masked man had left.
Damn the bastard to hell, he’d taken his knife with him.
Jess was one giant bruise, tied to a metal ring in the floor by her foot. Derek’s fingers were too damaged from trying to unknot his own ropes to be able to untie the tight knot that held her. And the camper was bare, stripped, save the old chunk of beige rug tossed on the floor. Nothing to convert into a weapon or a tool.
